MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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King's Day

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There’s a lot of reverent (no pun intended) talk today about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. Bill Maxwell in his 2003 St. Pete Times column even went so far as to castigate those who don’t speak in appropriately respectful tone of the slain civil rights leader.

One of the people Maxwell was unhappy with is comedian Chris Rock, who has made a habit of invoking Dr. King in often less than respectful vein:


Now there’s alot of talk about the people of Arizona being racist. So I went to see for myself, I went to Arizona and I’m walking through the streets of Tucson pushing my little baby brother in a stroller when a white woman comes up to the baby, smiles and says ‘Boy what a pretty niglet.’ Now if you don’t like black people, that’s one thing, but what I can’t understand is why people in a hot-ass desert town like Tucson, Arizona wouldn’t want a day off work. It’s not like you have to do something black on that day. You don’t have to read Ebony magazine, you don’t have to watch Soul Train, all you have to do is not work. Now if this was an Elvis holiday, they’d take that off. It would be like another Christmas. With big fat white guys coming down chimneys with Elvis jumpsuits on, giving out preyludes. Now, everybody doesn’t get Martin Luther King’s birthday off, even the states that celebrate, some people still have to work. Now one group that never have to work are prisoners. Criminals. Every criminal in every jail get’s the day off work, which means even James Earl Rey, the man who killed Martin Luther King gets the day off. He’s so crazy, he’s probably walking around prison saying, “Everybody gets the day off today and nobody even bothered to thank me. ” Now what Arizona needs to do is give Dr. King somebody else’s holiday. There are so many holidays we celebrate every year that mean nothing.

Like Columbus Day. Nobody celebrates Columbus Day, nobody puts three ships in their front yard. First of all, Columbus discovered the West Indies. Second of all, the land he discovered had occupants on it. That’s like discovering someone’s back yard. All Columbus did was discover a West Indian back yard. He got his little flag and said “I claim this land for Spain.” And the West Indians are like, “Hey, Mon, get your darn flag off me lawn now. Move it now!”

So Arizona, get your act together and hail the King! Thank you very much.

And there was his infamous joke that if a friend called you and told you he was lost on Martin Luther King Blvd, you should tell him to run. Personally, I think Chris Rock honors Dr. King with his jokes. I said, I think.

January 21, 2008
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Anti-fan?

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Happy Monday, folks.

I am not a fan of American football (the sport the rest of the world know as football Americans call soccer). Also, I don’t like the New York Giants (besides, they’re not even located in New York State, much less New York City). I nevertheless rooted for them to win in Green Bay yesterday.

Why?

I hate the New England Patriots more. I hate Belichek. I hate Brady. And, a couple of weeks ago, the Giants played really well against the Patriots, scored a lot of points and lost narrowly. I’m hoping the Giants’ defense that play against Green Bay shows up for the super bowl and that the Giants score a lot of points in the Super Bowl. I won’t watch the game. It’s usually a colossal bore. But I’ll check the papers in the morning.

I won’t rejoice if the Giants win. It’ll be satisfying that the Patriots have lost.

January 21, 2008
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Bill Clinton in his Labyrinth

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Bill Clinton is one of my favorite politicians. I appreciate the joy he brings to being in the public sphere. His presidency was a triumph. He accomplished a lot, especially for the economy, the environment and the general feeling he left that he had brought our nation back from the brink where the Reagan and the first Bush maladministrations left us.

Bill Clinton showed his fortitude and courage at the lowest moments in his political career. Anyone would have understood (well, maybe not) and forgiven him if he’d decided he did not feel up to delivering the 1998 State of the Union Address. Ken Starr and his posse were braying at the door. There were traps, perjury and whatever else, everywhere. And, in a closet somewhere, hid a certain stained blue dress.

Bill Clinton walked into the well of Congress in January 1998 defiant and strode out triumphant having delivered one of the best speech of his life.

That performance quelled, for a moment, the storms that would engulf him for much of 1998, one demeaning revelation after the other. But his travails served to focus him on his job as president. He expertly steered the ship of state and when he turned up in January 1999 to deliver the State of the Union Address, he reported to the country that he was just fine, thank you. And the nation, not half bad. The best economic climate in a generation and much, much, more.

Bill Clinton left office one of the highest rated presidents and he has continued to do good works even as he joined the ranks of one of the wealthiest men on the planet.

But Clinton is also a tragic figure. He possesses such prodigious talent, such intellect, yet barely scratched the surface of what he could have accomplished as president. He still has ambitions, things he wants to accomplish for the nation and for himself. I suspect that is why he’s fighting so hard to get his wife elected president. You cannot fault a man for that.

The problem is that the strain on him is showing.

Where is the old happy warrior? Why has Barack Obama’s candidacy so spooked him? Obama is Clinton’s truest heir. His pitch to the Reno, Nev., Journal Gazette, despite the backhanded slap at Bill, is classic Clintonism.

Whatever happens in this election, I want the old Bill back.


January 19, 2008
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People I like

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Tom Robbins of the village voice, one of my favorite writers, covered Obama talking and raising money in Jersey City last week:

Every pundit and pollster was still insisting that something
must have gone badly wrong for Barack Obama the night
before in the snows of New Hampshire as the line down
John F. Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City kept growing last
Wednesday. The line went down the street and around the
corner at St. Peter’s College, and it was clear by 3 p.m. that
at least a third of those waiting patiently for the rally with
the Democratic senator from Illinois weren’t even going to
make it into the gym at the school’s Yanitelli Center, which
had a capacity 2,000 people.

Read the rest of his piece here

January 18, 2008
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City Urged to Scrap Homeless Shelter Plan By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

March 21, 2002

Opponents of a proposed 400-bed homeless shelter in Williamsburg rallied against the plan last night, calling on Mayor Bloomberg to cancel it.

“What they’re creating is a warehouse for homeless men,” said Jose Leon.

Opening the East Williamsburg Industrial Park facility, at an old factory at 89 Porter Ave., is the first half of a plan to close the 800-bed 30th Street men’s shelter at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. The city will build a second 400-bed facility in the Bronx.

The Giuliani administration signed a $180 million, 22-year contract with the Manhattan-based Doe Fund to operate the shelter, immediately drawing the ire of Brooklyn elected officials and community activists, who sued the city.

Marty Needelman, a lawyer with Brooklyn Legal Services, said the city used subterfuge to avoid input from the community. But the city maintained the plan did not require review because, in part, the Doe Fund is a nongovernmental firm buying a building from a private seller.

“It’s a bad precedent,” Needelman said. “If the city can get away with avoiding the land-review process through this technicality on a $180-million project, then they can do that on a lot of other projects and undermine one of the critical features of the City Charter.”

Lower courts have ruled against the project opponents, but they have filed notice that they intend to appeal.

Even the Coalition for the Homeless — which fights to get the city to live up to its obligations to provide shelter, housing and services for the homeless — is opposed to the project.

“It’s an incredibly shortsighted and poor policy,” Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, said of the plan. “Our position has been that that money would be much better spent to open permanent housing for the rising number of homeless men.”

But George McDonald, founder of The Doe Fund, which finds work and provides treatment for homeless men, said the coalition should be working with The Doe Fund, not fighting it, on this project.

“This is a replacement facility, not a new shelter,” McDonald said. “In a system like we have in New York City, you have to have tranistional facilities. You can’t take somebody right off the street and put them in permanent housing.”

But Assemblyman Vito Lopez (D-Williamsburg) asked why it has to be Williamsburg, which has a waste-transfer station that processes 40% of the city’s trash daily and a 200-bed homeless shelter in nearby Greenpoint.

He said he had heard a bio-tech medical research facility is being installed in place of the Manhattan homeless shelter that would be closed down.

“Instead of giving us the homeless shelter, give us the bio-tech research facility,” Lopez said. “It would be a very positive thing for our community because it would create hundreds of jobs.”

Linda Gibbs, commissioner of the city Homeless Services Department, said the project is a necessary service.

“It is not a matter of making a choice between providing permanent housing, or a homeless shelter,” she said. The city has an obligation to provide shelter for anyone who needs it.”

March 21, 2002
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Ground Zero Yields African Burial Ground Relics By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Thursday, November 15, 2001

Even as the grim recovery work at Ground Zero continues, another casualty of the World Trade Center terror attacks has emerged: the controversial African Burial Ground project.

Officials say that some 100 boxes of burial ground artifacts were recovered from a laboratory in the basement of 6 World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attacks. But it is unknown how many more relics are missing.

Meanwhile, on the back burner, again, is the much-delayed plan to rebury remains of Colonial-era black New Yorkers and their artifacts — personal items found on top of coffins and scattered around the burial ground — at the lower Manhattan site from which they were excavated 10 years ago.

The artifacts recovered Oct. 12 from 6 WTC make up “a sizable portion” of the collection, but it is unclear how much of the total the 100 boxes recovered represents, said Cassandra Henderson of the General Services Administration, the agency responsible for the project.

She said recovery workers got into the ruins a month ago and collected artifacts, files filled with documents, thousands of photographs and computers used by archeologists in analyzing and conserving the artifacts. The recovered material must be cleaned up, studied and catalogued again — and searches done on the files contained in the recovered computers — to determine exactly how much was lost and how much was found, she added.

Construction workers clearing a site for a federal office building at Broadway and Duane St. in 1991 found skeletons and remains determined to be those of hundreds of enslaved African-Americans who lived in that part of Manhattan and buried their dead there from 1712 to 1794.

Agency Under Fire

Despite having spent $20 million to research the remains and artifacts, the General Services Administration has angered activists and community groups who charge that the agency dragged its feet in scheduling a reburial of the unearthed remains.

Charles Barron of the Committee of Descendants of the Afrikan Ancestral Burial Ground says the agency reneged on a promise to rebury the remains Aug. 17, the anniversary of the birth of back-to-Africa activist Marcus Garvey.

“All those artifacts and the remains would have been buried by now,” he said. “Instead, much that is valuable may now be lost, or damaged.”

The agency said it never promised an Aug. 17 reburial. Henderson insisted it wants “to focus totally on the African Burial Ground and honor the remains.” But she conceded it “will be very difficult to do that right now in New York City, with all the concerns we have.”

Barron was not buying that.

“I believe in nothing the GSA says. If they are concerned about all of that, those bones would have already been reburied by now,” he said.

November 15, 2001
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Storm Drains Focus Of Attack on W. Nile Virus By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and LISA L. COLANGELO, Daily News Staff Writers

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

May 16, 2001

The city stepped up its war against the West Nile virus yesterday, targeting storm drains where mosquitoes breed.

Thirty teams of workers fanned out across the five boroughs and dropped larvicide pellets into 8,000 storm drains.

By the end of the month, about 145,000 storm drains will have been treated with larvicide. The teams are marking the treated drains with white enamel spray paint as they go.

Larviciding targets mosquito larva and is a crucial first step in preventing the spread of West Nile virus. The city already has done small scale larviciding in ponds.

Be afraid, skeeters — be very afraid!

“It’s too early in the season to know yet how vigorous the virus is going to be in our area,” said Sandra Mullin, assistant commissioner at the city Health Department. “But we’re doing all that we can, like we did last year, to try to minimize the breeding of mosquitoes.”

The virus, which claimed seven lives in 1999 and two last year, is transmitted to people by mosquitoes. The virus has not yet been detected in the city this year. Five infected birds were found in New Jersey this month.

Crews from the Housing Authority — along with the city’s Environmental Protection, Parks, Sanitation and Health departments — are doing the larviciding work.

The one-year contract was apparently not lucrative enough to draw in bidders earlier this month, including Clarke Mosquito Management, which handled the city’s $4.6 million mosquito control contract last year.

Today the Health Department will find out if anyone bid on contracts to handle both larviciding and adulticiding — the use of pesticides to kill adult mosquitoes.

Scientists and environmentalists say it is a more effective way to control mosquitoes than spraying pesticides.

“If you do larviciding early on, you’ll be less likely to need adulticides later on,” said Dr. Stephen Ostroff of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It makes no difference to me whether it’s done by the city or done by a private contractor, as long as it is done correctly.”

Clarke was the only company to bid on the city’s original three-year, multimillion mosquito control contract last month.

But the Health Department rebid the contract after Clarke was slapped with a six-figure fine by state environmental officials for using untrained and unsupervised workers to spray pesticides in the city last summer.

May 16, 2001
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